Cloth Baby Wipes: An Attempt at Green, Frugal Living

My lovely friend and housemate Ellie gave me a baby gift of adorable jungle print cloth baby wipes made by her good friend Lindy. See how cute they are?

Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to get started with them, yet. (Yes, I do know that my son is now a toddler and this is pathetic, but I have a valid excuse!) Until now, I have been working full-time at a local University doing copyediting, formatting, and customer service for a quarterly publication on Christian ethics as well as planning and coordinating a medical ethics conference. It was a lovely position but I found it dreadfully hard to be away from my baby boy all week. When I did get home I wanted to spend the three hours before his bedtime enjoying my son and not doing extra loads of laundry. So, I didn’t start using them.

But now that I have the wonderful opportunity to be at home with my baby, I’m going to give them a shot. I think I’m going to stick with disposable wipes for the dirty diapers and use the cloth wipes for only wet diapers.

Here’s the ingredients for the solution to soak the wipes in before using them:

1/8 cup olive oil

1 tablespoon baby shampoo (we use California Baby, which I have loved)

4 drops tea tree oil

8 drops lavender oil

3 cups water

Mix the ingredients together and pour over wipes slowly.

Squeeze out the excess and pour it back over the wipes. Repeat. Make sure all the wipes are saturated.

Store in an airtight container.

So I’m planning on tossing them in the washer every two or three days maybe along with some towels. Any ideas for how I should store them in between use and the wash? A cloth bag, maybe? Is it ok to wash them along with bath towels or is that gross? Thoughts?

I never got started with cloth diapers, either, is it too late to start with them? Do you use cloth diapers? Is it worth it?

I’ll let you know how this experiment goes…

UPDATE: I love using cloth wipes. They clean so much better than the disposables and I know I’m not putting anything nasty on my baby’s body. After trying to put them in an air tight container with the solution (they kept getting a moldy smell), I decided to store them dry in one of my changing table drawers and have a spray bottle handy with the solution. And I usually make a ton of the solution all at once and store it in one of those giant glass organic apple juice containers and just refill my spray bottle every couple of weeks.

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Comments

I have an awesomely beautiful wet bag from my cloth diapering days. I did it for the twelve months leading up to Stella’s birth (though I used disposable wipes). You can have it if you bring Benjamin over here!

i have used cloth diapers on both of my boys. it is harder on a big boy (while an exclusively breastfed baby is super easy). it is definitely worth the money saved. a tip for you older baby, though: it is worth the investment to buy a pack of flushable diaper liners for the poops. they make it much more tolerable to clean a soiled diaper. you can get them at http://www.cottonbabies.com

totally ok to put them in with towels. and, yes, i’d store them in a cloth bag that is inside of a container with a lid.
also, as i don’t have a kid, i can’t say cloth diapers are worth it. but i can say that they are easy to change and to store. they fit some babies better than others (in terms of the occasional leakage)and i’ve seen less rashes with cloth than with disposable.
so there.

I just noticed this is a really old post… but here’s my two bits anyway….

Cloth wipes – I just have a little stack by the sink and when my little boy has gone #2 I bring him to the sink, he stands in it, hugs me, and I run warm water and wipe him off with a cloth wipe. Towel dry. Everyone has a different system that works best for him/her… this one started b/c baby had super sensitive skin and got rashes all the time when using cloth diapers. I ended up switching back and forth from disposables [didn’t want to] back to cloth [yay, but then he’d get rashy] a lot. Now that he’s 1.5 yrs his skin is not sensitive at all like before. Oh, and now, if he’s just peed, I pretty much just switch to a clean diaper and don’t even wipe. yeah, my hygiene may be lacking, but there seems to be no fallout from this laziness yet…. = )

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